And they all got eaten by werewolves

This morning I got approved to be a vendor at the local farmer’s market starting in May. My booth will have seasonal fruits + veggies, herbs + flowers, eggs, honey, apothecary products, baked goods, and hand-dyed, spun, & weaved fibers and baskets. When we planted our first seedlings a few grow seasons ago I never imagined we’d get to the point of being able to help nourish our community. We moved here with two babies, a dog, and not a goddamn clue on how to parent or farm; now we’ll welcome our fourth child by summer’s end (tho we still do not have the parenting gig down) and have become a sanctuary for forgotten animals that will now get to live their natural lives out in love, comfort, and peace.

It’s 2022 and the world is still a mess but if you’re in Maine this summer, stop by for hugs and flowers. 💐

Which farmers market?? I wonder if you’re near me! Your greenhouse is gorgeous btw

Of all the redemption arcs in popular fantasy media, I feel like Theoden's in The Lord of the Rings is the most overlooked.

The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.

Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.

Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.

And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.

I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.

As someone who struggles a lot with despair, I really needed to hear that story.

and it’s contrasted against Denethor’s arc; who also struggles against despair, and doesn’t overcome it.

yooooo. so I literally wrote a 20 page english paper about the Hope/Despair theme in Tolkien’s work once. It was like ten years ago and I don’t think I have it anymore, but oh boy do I have feeeeeeelings about this topic. And I have drunk a little bit of wine tonight! So here are my unasked for thoughts:

Yes, Theoden’s greatest enemy is despair! Everyone’s greatest enemy is despair. It’s the biggest fucking theme of the series IMO and it makes me crazy how often it gets overlooked.

lord of the rings is a story written by a man whose experience of war was crouching in the bottom of a trench. People like to make a lot of hay about the charge of the light brigade and it’s similarity to the ride of the rohirrim, but no. Tolkien’s experience of war was getting fucking trench fever, not watching cavalry charges. Tolkien’s experience of war was listening to the shells fall around him, knowing that death could come at any moment. He experienced war in a way where the soldiers on the other side of the line were a faceless threat, and the closest and most present enemy was his own fear.

this is the hill I will die on. This is why I hate it when people talk about LotR as a morally cowardly story about fighting mindless orcs that exist to be cannon fodder. No. Lord of the Rings is about seeing the dark coming on the horizon, and fighting yourself. Fighting the fear and despair that rise up inside you. Struggling with your own terror and powerlessness, knowing that you are small, and nothing you do will matter in the face of this massive conflict—  you’re just here, one more meaningless soul to feed into the machine guns. Lord of the Rings is about taking a deep breath, and bracing yourself, and deciding that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it. The ring can’t possibly be destroyed— we choose to form a fellowship anyway. Helms deep will surely fall by morning— we still choose to fight. The quest can’t possibly succeed— and yet we choose to march into the teeth of mordor to distract the enemy. It’s not hope, exactly? But’s it’s not not hope.

I did at one point have twenty pages written about this. Tolkien was a deeply christian man— he believed in eucatastrophe. Salvation. A better world to come, after suffering, if you bore your suffering well. But he was also a world-class Beowulf scholar with a kinda viking-warrior-type view of the world. And do you know what the vikings believed? (Pls don’t anybody @ me for saying viking, I know it’s a verb and not a culture). The vikings believed that the time of your death was preordained, and that all you had control over was how you met it.

And that is some seriously Rohirric shit!! Like, we’re all mortals doomed to die, Ragnarok is coming, and this whole world is an inevitable grind down into oblivion… but if we’re fighting a long defeat, all the more reason to fight it gloriously!! That’s epic. Eomer approves the hell out of that message.

I’m gonna be a real nerd now, and quote from a poem called the Battle of Maldon.

That’s a translation from an Old English poem that’s literally a thousand years old, but it always gets me how much it sounds like something Tolkien would write. Theoden and Eowyn are practically leaping out of that poem: We’re all going to die, I choose to meet my end fiercely. We’re all going to die, so I want to die beside my king.

It’s an acceptance of death, and even of failure, but not of defeat. Because— to get back to what I was talking about earlier— Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a story about battlefields. It’s a story about being at war with your own heart. Despair or faith? Hope or defeat? Tolkien wants you to know that even if your city is overrun by orcs, or you’re killed in a meaningless push for another 50 feet of french mud, you can still hold on to your courage with both hands and not cede up your soul to despair-- and that’s the battle Tolkien thinks is really worth writing about.

It’s a battle that every major character in the story fights. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Theoden, Denethor, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir, Eomer, Saruman, Gollum, Aragorn. Some of them hold onto hope through everything. Some of them break utterly. Some of them are defeated, and then with help find their footing again, and make a redeeming last stand.  

But the point that Tolkien hammers home again and again is: Death and failure are natural parts of life, and should be accepted. Despair shouldn’t be.

Tolkien says: hope is hard, actually. Fuck that Game of Thrones grimdark bullshit. Hope is hard fucking work. And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place.

Anyway, I fucking love these books. I am going to stop drinking wine, and go to bed now. :)

Motion to replace cottagecore with farming commune core.

Start romanticizing ownership of the means of (food) production by the workers and community interdependence.

If you are someone who likes to watch a lot of cop shows, I want you to ask yourself a few questions.

Why do all TV cops, even the good ones, hate Internal Affairs? Isn’t the job of Internal Affairs to root out the “bad cops”? Isn’t their job to make sure police follow the rules? Why is that presented as inherently evil or antagonistic? 

Why do all TV cops, even the good ones, hate defense attorneys? Isn’t the defense attorney’s job to protect the rights of all citizens? Isn’t it their job to make sure police follow the law? Isn’t it their job to make sure everyone is treated fairly under the system? Why is that presented as inherently evil or antagonistic? 

Why do all TV cops, even the good ones, get upset when citizens invoke their constitutional rights? Don’t those rights exist to ensure all citizens are treated fairly? Don’t they exist to ensure innocent people are not wrongfully incriminated? Why are citizens who invoke their rights presented as dishonest, untrustworthy, or antagonistic? 

To be clear, I’ve watched Brooklyn 99 and enjoyed it. I was watching Elementary the other day. But even when I watch shows I like, I make a mental note every time a cop lies, breaks the law, subverts someone’s basic rights, or just generally acts like an asshole to the people the are meant to serve and protect. 

How often are they called out on their behavior? How often are they punished for it? How often is it reinforced as correct by the narrative?

When I tell people to be critical of the media they consume that is what I mean. Not simply calling it terrible and moving on, but actually engaging thoughtfully, asking questions, and forming conclusions about what that media is trying to say to you. Then decide whether you want to keep listening, or if it will be better for you in the long run to move on.

Why do only the guilty people ever invoke their right to an attorney? I would invoke my right to an attorney.

Why are protections of innocent people’s rights only ever framed as “slowing the police down” and preventing them from really catching the bad guy? Why is it that every time an officer has an instinct to break the rules, they’re narratively vindicated?

It’s the same question as “but WHY do her superpowers require her to show so much skin?” A writer put that there.

I worked on the crew of Blue Bloods for seasons 7, 9, and 10. There’s literally a “thin blue line” american flag hung on the wall of the room where the cast does read-throughs and meetings and stuff.

Do the worms know where the water hides?

Are they 24/7 getting high on their own supply?

What else lives in the desert big enough for them to sustain their gigantic size and incredible speed?

Are they hermaphrodidic? Reproduce via budding? Sexually reproduce?

Do they lay eggs? do they have a larval stage?

Are they cartilagineous? Chitinous? Keratinous?

How? Do? These? Worms? WORK???

I can answer SOME OF THESE but not nearly enough information was provided, at least in the first book.

So, from what I can piece together is that the worms survive almost exclusively via cannibalism. Why? I don’t know. How is that even a little bit sustainable? I don’t know that either.

Their lifecycles begin as planktonic microorganisms living in the sand. Presumably they photosynthesize or convert heat from the sand into energy. These planktons grow into the sluglike larval sandtrout, which band together tonsequester water (why? to protect the adult sandworms from it?). Eventually their waste products mix with the water and cause an explosion, which creates the spice and kills off most of the sandtrout. The surviving sandtrout fuse together to form a young sandworm, meaning that sandworms are actually colonial organisms functioning as an individual, like giant scary pyrosomes, with each segment of the adult independent of the others and capable of surviving on its own?

The adult sandworms then glide through the sand like baleen whales, swallowing their own planktonic young. They also seem to cannibalize smaller adult sandworms, but leave the sandtrout alone. Presumably this is why they have giant crystal teeth and crushing jaws instead of, uh, sand baleen… because mammals contain too much moisture to be safe for them to eat in quantity. It really does seem like 100% of their natural caloric intake is “each other”, which seems like it should be prohibitively costly. It’s unclear whether the reason they are “enraged” by vibrations and attack whatever causes them is if they’re hunting, if they’re attempting to mate, or both. 

I don’t know if it’s ever established how or if they fuck, but I like to imagine they do it like leopard slugs, because I’m a freak and I think the visuals of two titanic sandworms dangling from a rock ledge on a rope of ??? slime ??? is very good.

[shrugs furiously] THEY DON’T MAKE ANY SENSE, FRANK. FRANK WHAT THE FUCK. I CAN BUY THAT THEY PRODUCE PSYCHIC AMBERGRIS BUT HOW THE SHIT DOES THEIR FOOD CHAIN REMAIN STABLE.

Apparently Frank Herbert did a looooot of shrooms when he was writing Dune. I think the writhing ouroboros of the sandworm’s life cycle makes a lot more sense in that context.

“In Russian, Baba Yaga’s name is not capitalized. Indeed, it is not a name at all, but a description—“old lady yaga” or perhaps “scary old woman.”  There is often more than one Baba Yaga in a story, and thus we should really say “a Baba Yaga,” “the Baba Yaga.” We do so in these tales when a story would otherwise be confusing. We have continued the western tradition of capitalizing Baba Yaga, since the words cannot be translated and have no other meaning in English (aside perhaps from the pleasant associations of a rum baba).  There is no graceful way to put the name in the plural in English, and in Russian tales multiple iterations of Baba Yaga never appear at the same time, only in sequence: Baba Yaga sisters or cousins talk about one another, or send travelers along to one another, but they do not live together.  The first-person pronoun “I” in Russian, ‘ia,’ is also uncapitalized. In some tales our witch is called only “Yaga.” A few tales refer to her as “Yagishna,” a patronymic form suggesting that she is Yaga’s daughter rather than Yaga herself. (That in turn suggests that Baba Yaga reproduces parthenogenetically, and some scholars agree that she does.)  The lack of capitalization in every published Russian folktale also hints at Baba Yaga’s status as a type rather than an individual, a paradigmatic mean or frightening old woman.  This description in place of a name, too, could suggest that it was once a euphemism for another name or term, too holy or frightening to be spoken, and therefore now long forgotten.”

— Sibelan Forrester, from her introduction to Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales

I feel like this suggests that - with much dedication and study - you, too, could go out into the woods and be a baba yaga.

The question then becomes whether the chicken house just manifests when you achieve Baba Yaga-hood, or whether you have to find or construct one. …Definitely not asking out of any desire to own a house on chicken legs. Of course not.

Well now I want to know, too

Who says it has to be one way or the other? If you are baba yaga enough, the house will come to you; if you build the house, being baba yaga will come to you.

What worries me about the baba yaga’s house arriving when she has reached baba yagadom is that it means the houses are out there somewhere…feral…breeding….

I imagine the houses also reproduce parthenogenetically, no?

Y'know what I really fuckin hate?

Tiny houses.

Not the concept, the notion, the Platonic ideal of a low-cost low-impact high-efficiency dwelling. That’s great. That’s awesome.

What really imagines my dragons is that in practice about 9 times out of 10 tiny house communities are just a way for rich hipsters to finally fulfil their greatest fantasy:

They found a way to fucking gentrify the trailer park

listen i know you’re making a point here but i cant stop thinking about ‘imagines my dragons’

Tiny houses are part of a bigger millennial trend that I like to call ‘the gentrification of poverty’

It also includes things like thrift shopping and “van dwelling”. It’s what happens when you have a generation who grew up middle class, and developed middle class tastes and aesthetics and expectations for their lives, but then grew up to be pretty fucking poor and crushed by debt.

America’s love affair with private washrooms emerges from the country’s most obvious gift—an abundance of land and an eagerness to develop it. The typical new single-family house in the U.S. is twice the size of the average urban or suburban dwelling in the European Union—more than 2,000 square feet versus approximately 1,000 square feet. Compared with their overseas peers, Americans simply have more space to wash up.

But the U.S. wasn’t always so profusely bathroomed. In the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled. “We went from two people per bathroom to one person per bathroom in the last 50 years,” says Jeff Tucker, an economist at Zillow. “That’s amazing, because postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept building more bathrooms.” Across the country, bathrooms are multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and households are getting smaller. [...]

It was another unscientific idea that led to the creation of the bathroom as we know it. In the mid-19th century, American sanitarians came to believe that disease stemmed from “sewer gas” emitted by toilets, which encouraged home builders to cram tub, sink, and toilet into one well-ventilated room with exposed pipes, in order to limit the spread of disease. While the sewer-gas theory would be overturned by the science of contagion, the three-fixture bathroom remained a staple of the modern American home. (Elsewhere around the world, the toilet is far more commonly found in its own chamber, separate from the bath.)

In 1940, only half of Americans had a three-fixture bathroom in their home. After World War II, several developments set the stage for the bath boom. [...]

American bathrooms haven’t grown only in number. As the square footage per person in a new single-family home doubled from the 1970s to the 2010s, so too did the typical size of a bathroom—from 35 square feet to 70, according to Hoagland. They’ve also grown in importance, taking on new, ever more fanciful roles, serving as “powder room, laundry room, phone booth, library, gymnasium, storage closet, and, for the affluent at least, a place of sybaritic luxury,” as Newsweek wrote in 1965. [...]

You might think that we have already reached Peak Bathroom. But the super-rich have other ideas. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported on a Bel Air, California, home that listed for $49.9 million. It featured eight bedrooms—and 20 bathrooms. By any rational assessment, this is a ludicrous use of money, space, and plumbing. But the U.S. housing market is rarely restrained by rationality. Indeed, the share of houses with 10 or more bathrooms has doubled in the past decade. It would seem that the richest 0.01 percent of Americans are spending down their fortunes in an arms race for toilets.

---

Americans will devote literally hundreds of square feet in their houses to bathrooms but still brush their teeth in the same place they take a shit in a way that not even fucking cavemen would do

real actual photo of me.

Dear family who want me around for major holidays,

If you haven’t worked retail since the Reagan administration, kindly FUCK OFF. Your Reagan-era and Reagan-inspired laissez-faire policies are why I fear retaliation for even considering asking off for any time in November or December. Yes, this will be my sixth holiday season in a row with no time off. I am well aware. I don’t have “seniority,” I can’t “pull strings,” there is no one who can “cover for me,” and my manager will certainly not “understand if I just don’t show,” not this time of year. Those are statements of things that were possible when unions were stronger in the 1970s and had the lobbying strength to make sure that employers weren’t running busy times on overworked skeleton crews with no backup. Accrued time off, and especially paid accrued time off, simply doesn’t exist anymore for anyone on an hourly wage, so even if there was coverage, I still need to eat.

If you’re so upset your children and grandchildren can’t see you for the holidays, maybe you shouldn’t have sold them into wage slavery in the 1980s and every election since with your voting habits.

As this circulates again for the 2018 holiday season, I’d like to remind everyone that the best ways to fix this are to 1) vote, early and often, 2) unionize, and 3) don’t shop on Black Friday weekend or the weekend of/immediately before Christmas. (Yes I’m aware Black Friday already happened, but it’s a good rule for all years.) Yes, the doorbusters are good deals. Those deals come at the expense of your comrades in labor. Don’t fall for it.

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN. Welcome to Christmas 2019!

This was posted one December night at 3 am after I had been badgered for over a month by my family to do a thing I simply could not do. I would like to remind everyone that the complaints in this post are NOT excuses to be assholes to your family members. Let the notes of this post be a place to vent, not the dinner table.

I would also like to remind all the nurses, cops, call centers, and everyone else with a “my job is so much harder than yours!” comment that yeah, probably, and you should demand better pay, conditions, and understanding, too. This is not zero sum. We ALL can and should expect better from our employers, customers, government, and families.

Give yourself a holiday present this year and unionize.

this made me want to try this

Not a cellphone in sight, just people living in the moment.

Jesus Christ what the fuck lol

and they say white people have no culture

Too accurate! 😂🤣👏

right back at you @lavvyan

Buying craft supplies and using craft supplies are two different hobbies.

The thing about Those White People Baby Names is the way they so poetically express the tension between individuality and rigid conformity. These parents all want to name their child something unique, because they value the concept of uniqueness, yet simultaneously they abhor it in practice… ergo, 30 different spelling variations on the most normative possible names. This homogeneity-masquerading-as-diversity is inseparable from capitalist consumer culture and in fact is directly analogous to the experience of walking into a grocery store and being asked to “choose” between 50 varieties of toothpaste with the same exact ingredients, 12 brands of laundry detergent, etc.

im sorry but even the literal concept of seeing another star wars movie after this next one and another avengers movie after endgame and whatever game of thrones threequel and avatar 93 and indiana jones 7 starring harrison fords corpse and all this marketing and spoiler warning shit and people not being told what theyre doing in scenes to protect the integrity of Who Dies when it all gets leaked 3 weeks in advance anyway by someone posting the plot on reddit and some shitty pandering to some community or another and people saying they really SNAPPED with this one *spasmodic 3 frame repeating gif of the only available shot of idk the caleb gallo guy in a background role in star wars 9 in full makeup as an ewok but hes wearing a rainbow loincloth or smth* and then 12 tumblr users replying with THE BAR IS SO LOW and Sir Your Boots pics and some cast member in an interview making a face that everyone gifs and says ‘you can see the pain shes experiencing because they ruined padme jr’s character arc ugh i feel so bad for her’ and the merch and the advertising campaigns and the official twitter account using a meme only to get 7483 unoriginal SILENCE BRAND replies all while they “reboot” movies that came out less than 20 years ago for 1 billion dollars on amazon prime and produce all female remakes of Peep Show instead of just writing something fucking original for once because they know THEY KNOW that no matter how many people post jeffrey tambor i dont want these dot png in response to the indiewire announcements about yet another disney live action remake people WILL pay money to see whatever shit they churn out as long as they get ONE big name to fart their way through The Songs We Know And Love……………all of this happening…the mere thought of it….is like literally making me want to put myslef in an isolation chamber for the next thousand years and i know i will be dead in like 50 anyway but i want my body to be left in there so even it does not have to come into contact with whatever hot garbage marvel is going to churn out in phase beta or whatever the absolute fuck

reblog this with what state you’re from and what neighboring state you like to make fun of. I’m from Ohio and I like to make fun of Indiana. cause they only have corn, Mike Pence, and one cool city. that’s it.

Southern Wisconsin and we make fun of yoopers

Pennsylvania and we make fun of New Jersey, “The Armpit of America”

New Jersey, and we make fun of Pennsyltucky!

LIKE HOW DO YOU GET THE PROPER TEMPERATURE MY GOD

This is the Chaotic Evil of making tea

I was born and raised in KANSAS and even I know that tea is made with a fuCKING KETTLE!

I can’t even imagine how that must taste.. *shudders*

Like sadness, I imagine.

I make my tea in the coffee pot

Natalie. 

Natalie.

why

She’s a chaos being in the flesh of a human and cannot be stopped. Chaotic Chaotic.

Here’s my suggestion on the alignment chart of tea making

Hmm. Good. True Neutral is heating water in a pan on a stove, I’d say.

Where are we putting “I have a Bunsen Burner and will take every available opportunity to use it” and “Leaves water on top of the dangerously hot radiator i should probably have repaired”?

Sun-brewed tea should be in here somewhere. Chaotic good, maybe?

OH! And water coolers! AKA bubblers. What about the tea brewed from the hot water spigot on a bubbler? I don’t know if that should be Neutral, necessarily... but there’s no alignment on the chart that conveys a sense of creeping despair under florescent lighting, so we work with what we’ve got.

The Evolution of the Foot Soldier

@kaldicuct @cazador-red @inked-up-nomad @robert-the-redhead-lover

If northerly relatives of the Persians circa 600 BC had discovered communism and begun democratically allocating production and resources on the basis of local councils, would that have been social Media?

Ohhhh fuck you

lady sansa stark of winterfell did not win the battle of the bastards, reuinte the entire north, watch her father and brother be murdered, survive two sadistic abusers, keep the northern people warm and fed for the winter, manipulate & outplay a master manipulator, rule winterfell by herself as a teenager, and kill two of everyones least fave characters just for ya’ll to dislike her for not wielding a sword